To each his zone

I used to think that one day all songs would have been written: all the possible combinations of the chromatic scale would be used up, and all that would be left to do would be to recycle the old stuff, maybe by putting new words to it. Not being mathematically inclined, I would further wonder about the number of meaningful permutations and combinations of English words. Wouldn't there come a time when nobody could copyright a song or a poem or story because they'd all have been written? Ecclesiastes (Koheleth - The Preacher) certainly said so.

That was B.G. Before Google.

Now, we are awakening to the fact that there is a vast amount that is not known, that has never been seen by most of the world's eyes, or heard by most of its ears. It is only our limitations of imagination and creativity that put bounds to our experience. Defensively, we enter the comfort zone, where the strange and the challenging are filtered out.

The urge to pressure others to adopt our beliefs and philosophies and customs, I think, comes from being outside our comfort zone, rather than wanting others to share it. "Mission" comes from the Latin "mittere", meaning "to send". When we are outside our zone, we feel the need to enlarge it to feel safer, so we send out missionaries of one sort or another. Some are people, some are simply messages of various kinds. The main opposition to missions of this type arises when other people are in their own comfort zones, and do not wish to be disturbed, let alone challenged, and definitely not converted.

So in all this time, we have not, apparently learned or accepted that most people like to be left alone, or at least helped to cope with life on their own terms. What is true of individuals is true collectively. Nations do not appreciate being invaded, occupied and despoiled in the guise of being "helped". People get upset when their world is turned upside down by the intervention of power over which they have no control.

It is not that we don't know all this. Deep from within that tiny place called "conscience", there is a voice crying out to us to do what is right; to respond to human need, not human greed. But years of being in a comfort zone of having everything we could possibly need and most of what we could possibly want have deafened the inner ear to that voice. Walls have been built, and continue to be built, to keep out those who annoy us. A wall of bureaucracy is stronger than a wall of concrete. The wall of indifference is strongest of all.

All walls eventually fall. The energy we waste in building them could have been used to eliminate the reasons why we build them in the first place.